Forum:Wiki Revamping: Time for a Facelift
Per our decision on Forum:Increasing Community Involvement, our community must come up with some plans on how to freshen things up. We want to attract new editors (which probably won't be too hard), but we need to improve editor retention. I would love to hear everyone's ideas. I've also got some of my own: *'Large-Scale Projects': As we all know, there are some big problems on this wiki that haven't been addressed. That is why I propose the creation of large projects that people can contribute to. This could take the form of revitalized teams or new projects. As for project ideas, we could tackle Chapter and Episode Stubs, Articles Without References, or updating old pages that are really lacking in content AND references. We have plenty of options here, and I have a number of other project ideas. *'Monthly/Weekly Goals': While big projects might give people a lot to do, many of the ideas are quite the tasks to take on. That is why we need smaller goals to achieve by month or week. For example, say we are updating Chapter Stubs. A weekly goal could be to complete 3-5 chapter stubs, or a monthly goal could be to complete all chapter stubs in an arc. These smaller goals might give people a better idea on how to tackle this stuff. You know what they say, the only way to eat an elephant is one bit at a time. *'Rewards!?!': Yes, rewards. I don't mean like prizes or gift cards. Let's be honest, incentivizing edits would bring more people. I propose that we create an Editor of the Week and Editor of the Month award. For the weekly awards, we can have separate categories for new and veteran editors so that new people have good odds of winning if they are making positive contributions. We could create a panel of veterans (most likely respected editors and mods) to judge the edits of the newcomers and a panel of high caliber vets (i.e. admins and maybe Kaido, arguably the best/most productive editor) to judge the edits of veterans. The only edits judged will be contributions to projects because it would get out of control to measure that much activity. At the end of the month, winners from both categories will be voted on to elect a winner by all of the judges. To keep things fair, editors/judges can also nominate/petition for another editor, who may not have won during one week but contributed a lot overall in the month, to be added to the judging. Winners would be featured on our Social Media outlets (please take a look at that forum) as well as the wiki homepage. *'Mentor Program': A complaint I have heard in the past from some non-editing members is the feeling that 1) they don't know what to do, or 2) they feel like their edits won't be good and others will give them crap for it. Why not help people out? Also, no one should have to feel like they are not welcome. I know in the past we have had some problems (SeaTerror) with people being rude to new users, but we can certainly fix that and create a more welcoming environment. I propose the following: a program where new users can sign up to receive a veteran mentor. The mentor will provide editing help/guidance with his/her own expertise. I know I wrote a lot, but I think these could all be very useful additions to our community. If we can reach more people through social media and gain new editors with immediate outreach to some of our new users sources, these options could give our wiki the boost it needs. However, I'd still love to hear other ideas. The more options we have on the table, the better we can figure out what will work best for us all. 05:17, April 7, 2017 (UTC) All of those sound like good ideas, but we would need to hear from more people if we want to actually implement anything. 03:30, April 11, 2017 (UTC) For the rewards thing we could try using badges to reward people for their edits. Spam Wiki incorporated the concept pretty well. We can make the badges obtainable for certain achievements, but let's not make them too easy to get (Edit your profile page or add 1 picture) 19:52, April 11, 2017 (UTC) :Drake, that's not a half bad idea. I forgot about badges since they weren't super common, but they could be a nice low-to-mid tier reward, which we lack right now. 21:21, April 11, 2017 (UTC) Large Scale Projects: I completely agree with you. There is more than enough to be done on the wiki due to the enormous amount of characters and details of the universe. *cough* Especially in the ol' reference section we are very far behind *cough*. That said there are few projects that we already set up (obviously no one ever contributed to these). You can find them on the Cumminity Messages. Monthly/Weekly Goal: If anything, this should be monthly. The wiki is active, sure, but not much greats can be done in just one single week (especially with refs, trust me). We can try it out, but this should be kept simple and most importantly, realistic. Important factor here is the amount of users actually willing to contribute to these goals. Rewards: The problem here is that this shouldn't take us more time than it could be worth of, if you know what I mean. I like the idea very much but it'll need to be simple and straightforward. I support the idea of just one judge commitee group choosing a User of the Week/Month/Fortnight consisting of well known active editors (doesnt necessarily have to be vets). I think that might be a fun little thing we can set up. I am against badges. I think that they will not fullfil the function that is expected of them, especially if you keep it low/middle tier. People will edit purely so that they can collect badges, and I have a gut feeling these edits won't exactly be diamonds in the rough. It kinda goes against what we want to achieve here. 21:40, April 11, 2017 (UTC)